Community engagement in water and sanitation service delivery is key for ensuring project sustainability and accountability. This Topic Brief looks at community engagement approaches used by WSUP in three cities within the African Cities for the Future (ACF) programme: Antananarivo (Madagascar), Kumasi (Ghana) and Maputo (Mozambique). The specific focus is on ways to encourage community involvement in the design of water supply and sanitation projects, and ways in which local service providers can elicit input and feedback from people living in low-income communities.

Extending water and sanitation services to the urban poor will often involve contractual relationships between small-scale entrepreneurs and municipalities or utilities. This Topic Brief draws on WSUP’s experience in the African Cities for the Future (ACF) programme to illustrate ways of dealing with the challenges that arise when developing this type of contract, providing practical guidance for programme managers on issues including contract enforcement.

Donor-funded water and sanitation improvement programmes operate within the formal frameworks put in place by municipal or national governments. However, in order to plan and implement programmes effectively, it is essential that implementers also recognise and take into account the influence of more subtle informal factors, such as conventions, norms of behaviour, and unwritten cultural codes of conduct. This Topic Brief draws on WSUP’s experience in the African Cities for the Future (ACF) programme, illustrating how both formal and informal factors can influence local service provider and low-income consumer behaviours – and providing practical guidance for programme managers on how to respond to these issues and ensure greater project sustainability.

This Topic Brief focuses on a delegated management model developed in Kumasi (Ghana), where a WSUP-facilitated partnership between the water utility, the Metropolitan Assembly and a community management committee is starting to play a key role in expanding the provision of clean, affordable water and improved public toilet facilities in the low-income district of Kotei. The Brief explores the nature of the model, the contractual arrangements, and the central role of the community management committee. It also examines the potential for scale-up and replication.

This Topic Brief explores the viability of communal or public toilets as an alternative to individual household toilets, noting the challenges of financing and sustainable management arrangements. It argues that communal or public toilets may be the most appropriate medium-term solution in some specific situations: notably in high-density slums with a high proportion of tenants and/or frequent flooding and water-logging.

This Topic Brief describes a business model for delegated management of local water services, recently developed with WSUP support in the Kenyan Rift Valley town of Naivasha. The model is designed to ensure affordable but high-quality services for consumers, profitability for the operators, and sufficient revenues for sustainable asset maintenance.